Dear Hart, Dear Crane

Dear Hart, Dear Crane
VENTRILOQUIST OF THE BLUE
Hart Crane
1899 - 1932

"Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!
While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main.
By what conjunctions do the winds appoint
Its apotheosis, at last -- the hurricane!"
The Air Plant
Hart Crane

By his own admission, Crane expected to do his best work sometime
in
later life, when he was thirty-five or forty years old. He didn't live
much past
thirty years old and by then his best work was behind him.
On April 27. 1932, J. E. Blackadder, captain of the ocean-liner
Orizaba,
which was cruising off the coast of Havana, Cuba, wired the following
message to poet Hart Crane's relatives in New York: "Hart Crane went
overboard at noon today. Body not recovered."
Hart Crane was well on his way to becoming one of America's
leading
modern American poets, his growing reputation based largely on his book
of
poems, The Bridge. Published in 1930, it was Crane's hopeful response
to T.S. Eliot's sense of hopelessness expressed in his classic work,
The Wasteland.
Despite his growing reputation as one of the country's leading
poets,
Crane was racked with self-doubt about the meager output of his work,
his talent
and his place in American literary history. He had spent much of his
short life,
beginning when he was seventeen years old, running away from his
reputation
both as a poet, as well as human being. From the time he left home in
Cleveland,
his life had been a series of drunken, homosexual escapades, followed
by guilt,
remorse and self-loathing.

Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies
Voyages: VI
Hart Crane

Crane was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931, which he used
to
move from New York City to Mexico where he intended to write an epic
poem on
the Spanish Conquest. According to Crane, he would study, "European
culture,
classical and romantic, with special reference to contrasting elements
implicit in
the emergent features of a distinctive American poetic
consciousness."
Crane's proposed epic poem never materialized. If he ever truly had
any
intention of going to Mexico to do what he promised, his best
intentions were
soon abandoned once he left New York. In spite of the continued efforts
of fellow
writers and neighbors staying in Mexico with him at the time, including
Katherine
Anne Porter and Peggy Baird, the former wife of Malcolm Crowley, Crane
gave
himself up extensively to alcoholic binges and homosexual as well as
heterosexual encounters. He lived the last year of his life in Mexico
with Peggy Baird in a futile attempt to recapture some semblance of a
heterosexual
relationship. Despite their ongoing affair, Crane was drunk much of the
time,
quarrelsome, seldom wrote and fell into a suicidal depression that
Baird tried
desperately to see him through. All he had to show for his stay in
Mexico was a
slim volume of twenty-three poems called Key West: An Island Sheaf. It
was the
last group of poems he produced before his suicide. The poems were
cohesive
and unified by tropical imagery and feeling. The title poem, "Key
West," was
Crane's reluctant farewell to his life in the United States and in
essence to
modern civilization.
Crane intended to publish the poems separately, however, following
his
death, they appeared as a single section, grouped together in The
Collected Poems
of Hart Crane, (1934) which was edited by his friend Waldo Frank.

"Because these millions reap a dead conclusion
Need I presume the same fruit of my bone
As draws them toward a doubly mocked confusion
Of apish nightmares into steel-strung stone?"
Key West
Hart Crane

Depressed by his lack of disciple and inability to write, Crane
began
talking openly to friends about committing suicide. No one, not even
his closet
friends believed him.
At the end of his fellowship year in Mexico, he was forced to return
home
to New York. Faced with the prospect of returning in utter disgrace, he
sank into
an even deeper depression. In early March 1932, several weeks before he
was
scheduled to sail back to America, he invited several women friends
over to his
house for one final party. He met his friends at the front door, sullen
and drunk
and announced that he had swallowed a dose of iodine to kill himself.
The dose
didn't turn out to be fatal, despite all his theatrics. He had been
living with Peggy
Baird, the ex-wife of the writer Malcolm Crowley, while living in
Mexico. It was
one of the few heterosexual relationships he had engaged in during his
brief
lifetime.
Following the failed attempted suicide, Crane convinced Baird to help
him
prepare his last will and testament. Baird, in an attempt to humor him,
consented
to help him write the document. Most of the personal estate that he had
inherited
from his formerly estranged father (Crane's father died shortly before
Hart left for
Mexico.) he left to a male lover -- Emil Opffer, a merchant sailor that
he began an
affair with in 1924. He and Opffer lived together in an apartment in
Brooklyn. A
shadowy view of the Brooklyn Bridge could be seen from the window of
their
small apartment. The Bridge served as the inspiration for his most
famous work.
Their relationship was affectionate and passionate, despite Opffer's
rough
hewn. He would often spend as long as eight weeks at a time out at sea,
returning
to be with Crane in Brooklyn for a similar amount of time. While Opffer
was with
him, Crane managed to maintain his sanity and control his otherwise
outrageous
behavior. But while he was at sea, Crane experienced bouts of
hysterical jealousy
and fear and often engaged in drinking binges. He often caroused the
waterfront
during these periods in search of meaningless sexual encounters. Their
relationship lasted a little more than a year. When Opffer could no
longer stand Crane's hysteria and jealousy he asked Crane to move out.
Even five years after their break-up, Crane still opined that Opffer
was the only one he ever truly loved.
"Won't be living at all any more if this ever reaches you. I remember
so
many things and I have loved you always and this is my only end," he
wrote in a
note to Opffer that was intended to accompany a copy of the will.
On April 24, 1932, he set sail from Mexico back to America on board
the
Orizaba. He was traveling home with Peggy Baird and was in good
spirits.
On April 26, the ocean liner stopped in Havana, Cuba. Havana had
been
one of Crane's old haunts. He disembarked alone while in port and ended
up
drinking in a waterfront bar with a group of rowdy sailors. That
evening he
returned to the ship, still drunk, where he tried to solicit several
sailors on board.
He was severely beaten and robbed. Instead of returning to his cabin
and to Baird,
he stayed alone on the top deck, drunk and bleeding from his wounds. A
night
watchman, patrolling the deck saw him, and fearful that he might jump
over
board, escorted Crane back to his cabin.
The next morning, after the ship sailed out of port, he had breakfast
with
Peggy in his cabin, where he confessed to her his night of debauchery.
She was
forgiving. A strikingly handsome man with a shock of prematurely gray
hair and a
youthful face, Crane was dressed in his pajamas and wore a top coat
draped over
his shoulders.
"I'm not going to make it dear. I'm utterly disgraced," he told
Baird.
She told him not to worry. No one on the ship would probably care
or
even notice what had happened the night before. Crane was not talking
about the
embarrassment of the previous night on board ship. He was speaking of
the
culmination of his whole life.
After she left him, Crane walked along the upper deck of the ship
still
dressed in his pajamas and top coat. He went to the stern of the ship.
There, he
removed and carefully folded his top coat, climbed onto the railing and
jumped
over board, plunging into the churning water below. Amid the shrieks of
shocked
onlookers, the ship's crew threw out life preservers to him, but he
made no
attempt to reach for them. He bobbed for a brief time above the waves
and then
sank below.
The ship stopped ten miles off the coast of Florida and spent the next
hour
circling the area trying to find some sign of him. His body was never
found.
One passenger, Gertrude Vogt, provided a first-hand account of
Crane's
suicide: "Just before noon, a number of us were gathered on deck...Just
then we
saw Crane come on deck, dressed in pajamas and a top coat. He had a
black eye
and looked generally battered. He walked to the railing, took off his
top coat,
folded it neatly over the railing, placed both hands on the railing,
raised himself
on his toes and then dropped back again."
According to Vogt, she and the others fell silent wondering what he
might
do next.
"Then suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea.
For
what seemed like five minutes, but was more like five seconds, no one
was able
to move; then cries of man over board went up."
After a search of the area, finding no trace of him, Captain
Blackadder
wired his message to the mainland. "Hart Crane went overboard at noon
today.
Body not recovered."

"Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured."
At Melville's Tomb
Hart Crane

Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899 in Garretsville, Ohio. He was
the
only child of Clarence and Grace (Hart) Crane. Christened Harold Hart
Crane, he
adopted the use of his middle name to show his support for his mother
after she
and Clarence divorced.
His parents were both high-strung and emotionally undisciplined.
They
were incompatible from the start. Their marriage was an unhappy one
from the
day of their wedding in 1898, through to their divorce in 1917 and
beyond.
Hart Crane suffered from nervous tension brought on by their
outrageous
and unhappy behavior. It was because of this early unstable period in
his life that
he would develop in later life an acute sense of insecurity, coupled
with the
inability to let himself rely on close personal relationships.
The unhappy relationship of his parents that he witnessed as a child
may
have also contributed to his homosexual lifestyle. Poet Allen Tate, a
close friend
of Crane called him, "An extreme example of the unwilling
homosexual."
His mother, Grace was a beautiful but neurotic woman. She was
horrified
by sex and spent a good part of her life suffering from undiagnosed
illnesses. She
sought comfort in Christian Science healing.
Grace Crane overwhelmed her son with her affection and readily
drew
him into her marital problems. By turning him steadfastly against his
father, a
position he maintained almost all his life, she created with Hart, a
morbid mutual
dependency based on the hatred of Clarence Crane.
"You, in my trouble, have been able to pay me for all the care and
anxiety
I have had for you since you came to me nearly eighteen years ago," she
wrote her
son, who was living in New York City at the time.
"I am expecting great things from you and when we see each other
again
we can talk over our plans which look very beautiful to me now. I am
asking you
to send me your love every day as I shall you," she wrote.
Clarence Crane was an ambitious man who was fixated on his
business
interests more than either his wife, Grace, or young Hart. By nature,
he was
unable to adjust to his unhappy wife's illnesses and fears. And he was
not able to
adjust to his only son's sensitive nature or his writing. Clarence
Crane married
twice after his divorce from Grace in 1917 and he remained distant and
alienated
from Hart until several years before Hart committed suicide. Clarence
Crane died
in 1931, shortly after finally reconciling with his son.
Grace Crane survived her son by fifteen years. During this period,
she
devoted herself to his writings and memory, working feverishly with
editors to
publish his posthumous collections. Over the years she lost both her
fortune and
her beauty. She lived out her final years in dire poverty in New York
City.
Ironically, her last request was to have her body cremated and her
ashes spread
from the Brooklyn Bridge -- the icon of her son's most famous
work.

"Scatter these well-meant idioms
Into the smoky spring that fills
The suburbs, where they will be lost.
They are no trophies of the sun."
Praise for an Urn
Hart Crane

As a child, faced with his father's intolerance and his mother's
emotional
blackmail, Hart Crane developed a volatile personality. He was
passionate about
his writing and became deeply attached to his boyhood friends. These
psychological highs both with people and his writing were followed by
extreme bouts of depression, anger and unfounded fears. Although not a
prolific writer, he was dedicated and hard-working. He often worried
over his work to the point of
physical illness, especially when inspiration failed to motivate him
and he was
unable to write.
When he was four years old, his family moved from Garrestville
to
Warren, Ohio, where his father opened a candy making factory. In 1908,
while his
mother was recovering from some unnamed illness in a nearby sanitarium,
Hart
went to live with his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Hart in
Cleveland. It was in
Cleveland, with his grandmother, that he called home.
He turned one of the two huge wooden turrets along the front porch of
his
grandmother's old house into his sanctuary. He furnished a small room
at the top
of the turret, overlooking the street, with a desk, chairs, records and
a record-player, stacks of books and his typewriter. He referred to
this private place as his "ivory tower."
It was in his grandmother's house that he developed his love of
literature
and poetry. At the age of ten, he declared his lifelong intentions to
Grandmother
Hart. Looking at the stacks of books that she had in her library, he
proclaimed to
her: "This is going to be my vocation. I'm going o be a poet."
In 1914 he entered the prestigious East High School. He was a
good
student, studying English Literature, mathematics and language.
Although his
academic standing was never in doubt, his formal education was sporadic
due to
his frequent absences. He never completed high school. Grace Crane
often took
him with her following fights she had with her husband. During these
times of turmoil she would travel extensively. In 1916, following a
particularly nasty argument with her husband, she withdrew Hart from
school unannounced and took him on a tour of the West Coast and Canada.
Most of his education he
achieved on his own. He was constantly reading the works of Emerson,
Whitman,
Browning and others. His earliest poems were homages to them.
He was not content with merely reading the classics. He kept abreast
of all
the newest, avant-garde writers by frequenting a small bookstore in
downtown
Cleveland where all the latest literary journals and books were
sold.
Following his parents divorce in 1917, and no longer content to stay
in
Cleveland, he made plans to move to New York City. His parents arranged
for
him to receive private tutoring and then made plans for him to enroll
in Columbia
University. This was not what he intended to do. He saw no point in
spending
another four years in school. He wanted to launch his writing career
immediately.
At seventeen years old he left his home in Cleveland and moved to
New
York City. The move was to help establish his credentials as a writer,
but also to
escape his overbearing parents. In New York, he made friends with a
former
Cleveland native and artist, Carl Schmitt. It was Schmitt who mentored
the young
Crane on modernist ideas about art and literature. Schmitt later
introduced Crane
to the Irish poet and dramatist, Padraic Colum. Colum introduced Crane
to the
symbolist poetry of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Baudelaire.
"As expected, I am right in the swing of things," he wrote his
mother.
In September 1917 he published his first poem in a small New York
City
literary journal called Bruno's Weekly. He took this as a sign that his
literary
career was off and running. Living off an allowance that his father
sent him, he
became quickly acquainted with Margaret Anderson, the publisher of The
Little
Review. Anderson's journal was in the forefront of giving voice to
modernist
poets T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. The Little
Review's
foreign editor was Ezra Pound. Crane worked for a time selling
advertising space
for the review.
He also attached himself to another New York City-based literary
journal,
Seven Arts. This small journal published the works of American
writers,
Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Robert Frost. One of the
founders of
the journal, Waldo Frank, became another major influence in Crane's
life. After
Crane's death, Frank served as the editor of his collected poems.
Despite the heady literary company he kept, his life in New York was
not
easy. Since he wasn't interested in doing anything but writing poetry
and refused
to take any sort of job that might interfere with his writing, he was
always short
on finances. There was also the continuing conflicts back home in
Cleveland
between his mother and father.
Within a year of moving to New York, he published several new
poems
including "Fear," and "Annunciation." They both appeared in the
Greenwich
Village literary journal, Pagan. After living in New York City for two
years and
without any visible means of support, his father issued an ultimatum --
either Hart
produce some evidence of finding a job, or his allowance would be cut
off.
Without his father's money to support him, he could not survive in New
York. He begrudgingly returned home to Cleveland where he went to work
in a munitions factory as part of the war effort. From there he took a
position as a newspaper
reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Finally, he accepted a job as
a clerk in
one of his father's stores in Akron, Ohio, but after a particularly
bitter fight with
his father, he left the job and returned once more to New York
City.
Back in New York, he worked briefly as an advertising copywriter for
the
J. Walter Thompson Agency. He never held any job for too long because
of his
devotion to his own writing.

"Mortality--ascending emerald bright,
A fountain at salute, a crown in view--
Unshackled, casual of its azured height,
As though it soared suchwise through heaven too.
Royal Palm
Hart Crane

By 1926, his first collection of poems, White Buildings was published.
It
was hailed by many critics as a major work by an emerging writer.
"I feel an absolute music in the air," Crane said after its
publication.
All but two of the 28 eight poems in White Buildings were
written
between the years 1920-1925. One of the poems "Chaplinesque," was
inspired by
Charlie Chaplin's movie, The Kid.
"I am moved to put Chaplin in with the poets of today," Crane wrote.
"I
feel I have captured the arrested climaxes and evasive victories of his
gestures in
words."
Another poem in the book, "Praise for an Urn," was written as an
elegy
for Ernest Nelson. Crane served as a pallbearer at Nelson's funeral.
Ernest Nelson
was a Norwegian who came to America in his teens, settled in
Cleveland,
attended art school, produced a few good paintings and also wrote
several
provocative poems. Despite his immense talent, Nelson was forced to
become a
lithographer in order to make a living.
"One of the best read people I ever met," Crane said of him. "He was
one
of the many broken against the stupidity of American life."
Crane called Nelson's funeral, "One of the few beautiful things
that
happened to me in Cleveland."
Crane was now in contact with many of New York's best new writers
and
was considered by many of his peers and critics as one of the most
talented young
poets in America. At the same time, he was working on the fifteen
sections of The
Bridge.
Crane's second collection of poetry was begun in 1923 and took
him
seven years to complete. It was his longest and most ambitious
work.
"At times the project seems hopeless," he said. "And then
suddenly
something happens inside one, and the theme and the substance of the
conception
seem brilliantly real, more so than ever."
In this monumental work, (Poet Robert Lowell called Crane, "The
Shelly
of my age!") Crane tried to merge the styles of modernism, symbolism
and post
impressionists with the spirit of American romanticism. For Crane, The
Bridge
was a hopeful response to the poet T.S. Eliot's futile view of the
world expressed
in The Wasteland. In The Bridge, Crane celebrated Americanism, trying
to prove
that civilization was not a "waste land," as Eliot proposed, but rather
a "bridge"
of evolving human condition.
Crane left New York for the Isle of Pines in the Caribbean, where
he
completed much of the work on the book. It was one of his most
prodigious
periods. After returning to New York with much of The Bridge written,
he went
to Paris, where he stayed from 1928 to 1929. Much of his time in Paris
was spent
carousing, drinking and engaging in a series of ill-fated homosexual
relationships.
Crane called Paris, "The most interesting madhouse in the world."
His endless drinking and partying took its toll on his health and
his
previous devotion to his new book of poems. During this period he
worked very
little on The Bridge. Following a drunken episode and fight at a Paris
cafe that
landed him in jail, he returned to New York in the throes of despair.
It was not
until the end of 1929, prompted by promise of its publication, that he
went back
to work on the poems. In 1930, after seven years of work The Bridge
was
published.

"For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts."
Chaplinesque
Hart Crane

"The Bridge, as a whole, is I think an affirmation of experience, and
to
that extent is positive rather than negative in the sense that The
Wasteland is
negative," Crane proclaimed.
He referred to the book of poems as, "A bridge between so called
classic
experience, our seething, confused cosmos of today."
He thought of the work as his magnum-opus -- his poetic testament,
and
envisioned it as his own Sistine Chapel. Divided into various sections,
The Bridge
begins with "Ave Maria," an imagined monologue of Christopher Columbus
as he
is returning from his maiden voyage to America. In Crane's mind,
Columbus was
a poetic visionary.
"Powhatan's Daughter," follows, including five subdivisions. In
this
section, Crane envisions Pocahontas as the mythical body of America
intent on
being explored physically and spiritually.
In the third section of the book, called "Cutty Sark," Crane describes
the
world as a fantasy period on board American clipper ships.
"The ships should meet and pass in line and type, as well as in wind
and
memory," Crane said.
Over the years, there has been some discussion about Crane's
non-too-subtle reference to the scotch whiskey of the same name, whose
logo is a
clipper ship. Crane suffered from alcoholism and scotch whiskey was his
drink of
choice.
The rest of the sections of the book try to present a hopeful
discovery of
America and of self. Despite its intensity, by the time it was
published, Crane had
lost all enthusiasm for the work. He told friends he was "rather
disappointed," by
the result of his long labor on the poems. And Crane was not the only
one
disappointed with the work. Shortly after its publication an
unfavorable review of
it appeared in Poetry magazine. Crane considered the review, written by
a friend
and fellow poet, Yvor Winters, a bitter personal attack and betrayal.
Other critics
followed suit. The reaction to The Bridge was generally hostile or
indifferent.
"Structurally, on both spiritual and formal planes, the poem remains
a
muddle," one reviewer wrote.
"The poem is wordy chaos, both locally and in sum. I cannot see
that,
apart from the conviction of genius and his confidence, he had any
relevant gift,"
another particularly nasty review went.
Even his good friend, poet Allen Tate criticized the work.
"I think he knew that the structure of The Bridge was finally
incoherent
and for that reason he could no longer believe even in his lyrical
powers," Tate
wrote. Faced with growing unfavorable reviews, nearly out of money and
feeling
betrayed even by his closest friends, Crane fled New York for Ohio,
where he
reconciled with his father, after so many years of separation. He had
already
broken dramatically with his mother and for a few brief months, he
enjoyed peace
and tranquillity at home. In 1930, after years of manipulation by his
mother,
Crane broke off his relationship with her for good. He blamed her for
his own
psychological disintegration and spiritual downfall.
"I don't want to fling accusations etc. at anybody, but I think for
the last
eight years my youth has been a rather bloody battleground for your and
father's
sex lives and troubles," he wrote his mother.
In the book, The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity
and
Madness Controversy, author and researcher Arnold Ludwig notes, "Anyone
who
achieves creative greatness is dedicated." And in Ludwig's view,
this
monomaniacal dedication is the real price of greatness. It isn't,
according to
Ludwig, madness, but the "inevitable trail of domestic
destruction."
"Work is paramount to great artists and there's a lot of family
fallout,"
Ludwig says.
Hart Crane was not only a victim of his dedication to poetry, but
its
inevitable backlash --"domestic destruction."

"The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals....And I, their sexton slave.
The Broken Tower
Hart Crane

Crane applied and received a Guggenheim Fellowship based on his
proposal to begin work on a long epic poem about the conquest of
Mexico. He
returned to New York to prepare for his journey, but that winter, his
father passed
away.
Prior to leaving for Mexico and following the death of his father whom
he
had finally reconciled with, Crane appeared to have shaken off most of
the
demons of his past despair. He settled into Mexico where he lived with
Peggy
Baird and began work on his new group of poems, Key West: An Island
Sheaf.
But like much of his life, what Crane appeared to be doing and what his
true
intent was remained t polar opposites.
Hart Crane jumped to his death from the stern of the deck of the
oceanliner, Orizaba, shortly after noontime on April 27, 1932. He left
behind no
suicide note.
The published reports of his suicide only further fueled his image as
a
tragic romantic American poet, driven to his untimely death by
madness.
Over the years critics have objected to Hart Crane's obscure and
complex
structure and style. But Crane always maintained that it was, "Part of
a poet's
business to risk criticism."
Ironically, in 1922, Hart Crane said that he expected to do his best
work in
later years.
"I shall do my best work later on when I am about thirty-five or
forty," he
wrote.
He never lived to see that day.
According to reviewer Joseph Miller, "There is now an abundance
of
learned study of Crane's life and work, and the interest that he
continues to
inspire among young poets and readers of poetry today is enough to
inspire Allen
Tate's original opinion (written in 1925) that Hart Crane's poetry,
even in its
beginnings, is one of the finest achievements of this age."
Because of the tragedy of his personal life and the internal conflicts
he
faced, it is surprising that he could produce anything at all of a
creative nature.
Despite all his frailties and foibles -- his alcoholism, his
homosexuality and his
deep family conflicts, he continued to write.
According to author Arnold Ludwig, "If a politician drinks or is
depressed,
he or she will try to hide it. But when you hear that a poet drinks or
has been
mentally ill, you will think -- so what else is new?"
Despite his meager output, many critics today hail Crane as one of
the
leading poets of the American Jazz Age (1920-1930). Jazz was a unique
and
totally American contribution to the dichotomy of music. It hit its
peak of
popularity during the 1920s. Hart Crane was a product of this period of
innovation and experimentation. This period in American history
produced many giants in the field of literature, among them, Sinclair
Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest
Hemingway and John Dos Passos.
Like the Jazz Age itself, Crane was totally unique and American. The
end
of the 1930s brought with it the heady days of America's Jazz Age. Out
of tune
and out of time, Jazz Age players like Hart Crane slouched forlornly
into the
Great Depression.
Hart Crane, despite all his personal struggles tried to find in poetry
what
he could not find in life -- a sense of hope. It was only in death and
after nearly
fifty years, that his poetic legacy has found its rightful place in
American
literature.
For Hart Crane, the question first posed by the Greek philosopher
Aristotle
remains an epitaph.
"Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or
the
arts are melancholic?"

"What laughing chains the water wove and threw!
I learned to catch the trout's moon whisper; I
Drifted how many hours I never knew,
But, watching, saw that fleet young crescent die..."

The Dance
Hart Crane

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